Neurodiversity and neurodivergence
for greater understanding

Alexandre Oliva

Just like bodies and appearances, minds can also be diverse. Each mind is unique in a multidimensional spectrum. A supermajority clusters in a neurotypical region. We, the neurodivergent, are various minorities scattered all over the spectrum.

The term "neurodivergent" encompasses various kinds of atypical mental and behavioral traits, including autism, dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity. I write from my personal standpoint as an informally self-diagnosed person who publicly identifies as neurodivergent, probably within the autistic part of the spectrum. This narrows down my personal experiences, and my observations of people around me, similar by nature or selected for identification. There's a lot I don't know about other parts of the spectrum, or even about my own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity

Such different "wiring", different functioning, different configurations occasionally confer some apparent "superpowers" to some lucky-ish neurodivergent people, but they involve tradeoffs that invariably make for significant difficulties in other abilities. That disparity can be surprising. Many neurodivergent people only experience the downsides of their variations, and some of them can be quite severe.

One common kind of difference we experience is in the intensity of senses and feelings. While some may be muffled, others may be overwhelming, leading to sensory overloads, including extreme difficulties to deal with ambient noise, eye contact, touch and food textures. This may also be apparent in triggers and flashbacks, whose effects can be so overwhelming as to cause a meltdown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_meltdown

Tip: if you perceive someone trying to deal with a meltdown, such as out of extreme frustration, beware that even something well-meaning as offering help often increases sensory overload, and the response from someone who was already overwhelmed may come across as impolite and unreasonable. Please give us some time to self-regulate, and tolerate non-harmful stimming, so that we don't need to engage in masking, which may increase stress and prolong the crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_masking

Many of us experience unusual interests, sometimes for life, sometimes for a brief period of time. Some of them can be extremely intense: a hyperfocus may take up full attention while it lasts, and great expertise and verbose interactions may grow out of such bouts of passion for a topic, but trying to get them out of one's mind often results in disappointment.

Some of our cognitive variations enable prodigies of memory, attention span, math skills, language proficiency, but they may also impair executive function and spoken, written and body language. Some of us are unable to get nonverbal cues, which may complicate social interactions.

Mental rigidity is a common trait that may be expressed as unusual habits, resistance to change, language pedantry, and difficulty in conforming to arbitrary social norms. In our different ways of thinking, we often perceive context differently, make unusual connections, and come to uncommon conceptual frameworks.

All this put together often gets us labeled as eccentric, or other less kind variations. Some of us develop abilities to mask some of the differences, in attempts to pass as "normal", to avoid bullying, to increase acceptance. Masking and sensory overload can be exhausting and stressful, draining our social batteries to the point of requiring recovery time in peaceful, quiet, lonely settings.

Whether features or bugs, some of these traits are integral parts of our selves, and even well-intentioned attempts to change us often do lasting harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Use_as_therapy_for_autism
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://www.autreat.com/dont_mourn.html

Like people with other disabilities, differences or special necessities, we need tolerance, acceptance and some accommodation so that we can develop our potential and be our true selves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_rights_movement

An important obstacle to acceptance and tolerance is the apparent lack of empathy attributed to some of us, even when we're able to empathize with minds closer to ours in the spectrum. Conversely, we often also feel a lack of empathy from neurotypicals, and also from neurodivergents whose minds are not close to ours in the spectrum. The mutual lack of empathy may be explained by the difficulty of forming a theory of mind for others, out of not realizing that minds can be so different from each other in perceptions, sensitivities, contexts and communication skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Awareness of one's own minority status, differences, and special needs may help neurotypical and neurodivergent understand, tolerate, respect, recognize and accommodate other's (and one's own!) special needs. I hypothesize that such awareness could even help bridge the empathy gap, as we form more general theories of mind that encompass various traits that are unlike our own.

Our language and empathy challenges, and our anxiety over rules that appear (to some of us) unwritten, unclear, and applied in (again, to some of us) confusing and surprising ways, can make it hard for us to feel welcome sometimes, even in communities that are otherwise making efforts to welcome diversity. Greater empathy and understanding should be particularly valuable in software development communities, which have historically attracted a larger proportion of neurodivergent people than exist in the population at large.

Tip: when you come across behaviors you find uncool or inappropriate, instead of presuming (neuro)typical motivations, please embrace tolerance, inclusion, and (neuro)diversity: assume good intent, ask clarifying questions, listen, and try to work things out without hostility. Bear in mind that we don't necessarily share notions of common sense, that we may arrive at thoughts and behaviors by different paths and for different reasons, and that conclusions that might be reasonably drawn about neurotypicals do not necessarily apply to us, and vice-versa.

This piece is too brief (yeah, I know: hyperfocus verbosity and superficial to reverse that trend, but hopefully it's a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

This article was originally written for the Inclusion & Diversity Newsletter at AdaCore. I thank the I&D committee for the invitation to write it and for the various wording improvements, and the several external neurodivergent reviewers for their feedback.